Savant Stephen Wiltshire is taken on a 45-minute helicopter ride over Rome. It’s the first time he’s seen the city, he is filmed as he draws an accurate representation of the city for the next five days on a fifteen-foot long sheet of paper. Amazing stuff, I want to see the whole film now.

Stephen Wiltshire has been called the “Human Camera.” In this short excerpt from the film Beautiful Minds: A Voyage into the Brain, Wiltshire takes a helicopter journey over Rome and then draws a panoramic view of what he saw, entirely from memory. Incredibly, however, Wiltshire does not have a photographic memory (according to this article, no one does). While his drawings possess uncanny accuracy — he gets the number of arches in the Colliseum exactly right — they are not like a Xerox. As Oliver Sacks writes in his book An Anthropologist On Mars, “His pictures in no sense resembled copies or photographs, something mechanical and impersonal — there were always additions, subtractions, revisions, and of course, Stephen’s unmistakable style. … Stephen’s drawings were individual constructions, but could they been seen, in a deeper sense, as creations?”

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